Smith's in at PlanetOut

The young gay online company with the troubled past and promising future has a new president, Megan Smith.

14 May 199712:10 pm AEST

Megan Smith has raced across the Australian outback in a solar-powered car
that she helped build, worked in Japan for Apple, traveled through Europe for General Magic, and addressed
deforestation in South America--not necessarily in that order.

Now the 32-year-old MIT mechanical engineering grad is taking on a project that rivals them
all. She is the new president of PlanetOut, a
young gay online company with a troubled past and promising future.

The last time PlanetOut made the news, at the end of January, it
announced its reorganization after a power struggle threatened to shut
it down.

Tom Rielly, founder and now chief executive officer of PlanetOut, had been
temporarily ousted from the board but regained power, replacing outgoing
president and CEO Jon Huggett.

Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm that had poured $2.7 million into
PlanetOut, also pulled the plug in January, leaving some to wonder whether
the organization would be able to make it financially. But Rielly, who took
over as majority stake holder, said PlanetOut is in good financial shape. America
Online's
(AOL) Greenhouse Networks stayed in as a minority partner.

While the going hasn't always been easy, Rielly, appointed chairman of the board last night, said the company has been growing since January.
"Things at PlanetOut are going better than expected," he said. The
community, which has a large presence on America Online as well as the Web,
tripled its hours on AOL between December and May, and Web traffic more than
doubled since the announcement, he said. Advertising impressions were up to
3.4 million in April.

Smith, appointed president last night, said she's excited by the opportunity. "I just really believe that PlanetOut is in the right place at the right time," she said. "We are inventing the whole Internet business together--as we set up, we're also inventing how we do it."

Enthusiasm aside, and truth be told, Smith landed at PlanetOut almost
by accident.

Last summer she decided to leave her job at General Magic, where for six
years she had done everything from mechanical engineering to managing
products to working on commercial and strategic alliances and business
development.

She wanted to "switch gears" and do community work. Her plan was to go to
the Carter Center to work on housing for poor people. Then Rielly called.

"I had left General Magic and six days later Tom called and said 'we are
shipping our product, can you come for a month and do it?'"

She stayed for several months, deciding to leave when Rielly was originally
ousted from the board. She went back to Australia for some R&R.

Then, Rielly called again. Soon, Smith was on a plane back to
PlanetOut. The fit, both say, is a natural.

"He knows I believe in this team. He saw me successfully lead this team and
keep them together in pretty rough times," Smith said.

Smith knows the technical side of the business as well as the marketing side, and marketing is exactly what a company like PlanetOut needs, Rielly said. She also comes
with an impressive list of contacts that include the likes of Nicholas
Negroponte, director of MIT's Media
Lab, the president of MIT, and Disney fellows Marvin Minsky and Alan
Kay--to name a few.

Danny Krifcher, president of Greenhouse and a PlanetOut board member, is
equally enthusiastic about Smith can bring to the table.

"She comes out of the world of technology and the world of media," Krifcher
said. "She has done a great job to really tighten up and motivate the
PlanetOut team."

But there is a bottom line, Krifcher said: PlanetOut needs to make money
and Smith seems to be helping.

"At the end of the day the mantra is big revenues," Krifcher said. "I'm
very bullish on PlanetOut. I think if you look at the gay community,
they're a community where we know their passion about online and the
Internet. We know they have disproportionate discretionary revenue and
there's more and more advertisers that are targeting the gay community."